Chapter Text
I've faced the fathoms in your deep,
Withstood the suitors' quiet siege,
Pulled down the heavens just to please you, appease you.
The wind blows and I know
I can't go on digging roses from your grave,
To linger on beyond the beyond.
Where the willows weep and the whirlpools sleep,
You'll find me.
–
1.
Sister Jenna had lived at St. Luke's since her mother died when Jenna was four years old, and in all of those seventeen years, she had only ever seen one outsider visit the two graves at the back of the garden: an agent of the Vatican named Wolfe who made the journey to the outskirts of Rome once a year. They had been coming, Father Callahan said, since the day the gravestones had been erected, shortly after the Battle of London which took place a few years before Jenna was born. As a child, she had been afraid of the agent, a person of indeterminate gender who was perpetually swathed in a dark coat with their eyes hidden behind tinted glasses.
None of that frightened the young Jenna, but the bandages did, wrapped around Wolfe's jaw and lower face like those of a mummy.
Even as an adult, Jenna made herself scarce whenever Wolfe was due for a visit. It helped that they came on the same day every year: the birth date inscribed on the gravestone of Sister Yumie Takagi. Callahan had told Jenna that Wolfe and Sister Yumie had grown up together at St. Luke's, and both had been present at the Battle of London. Yumie had died there, and on her birthday each year, Wolfe came to pay their respects. They never brought flowers or anything else; they only knelt before Yumie's grave for a few minutes, head bowed, before crossing themselves and rising.
Then they paused in front of the other gravestone, head again bowed, but only for a moment and without kneeling. They made the sign of the cross again, then turned and left for another year.
The second grave bore the same date of death as Sister Yumie's, but no date of birth. Also unlike Sister Yumie's, it held no remains because, according to Father Callahan, there had been no remains to inter. Whatever had killed Father Alexander Anderson at the Battle of London, it had decimated his body entirely.
Another child of St. Luke's had perished that day as well, but Enrico Maxwell was interred at the Vatican. Jenna presumed that plenty of people paid their respects to him, considering that he had died an archbishop, but no one save Wolfe seemed to care about Sister Yumie and Father Anderson.
And so Jenna took it upon herself to care about them too. Father Callahan had never met either personally, having only arrived at the orphanage to take over in Anderson's stead after his death; however, he told her that he'd known his predecessor by reputation.
“By all accounts, he was a kind, warm-hearted man,” Father Callahan had said one of the several times Jenna asked questions. “Strict with the children when it came to discipline, but he loved them dearly, and they him.”
He'd taken down one of the orphanage's photograph albums from a shelf in his office and shown her a picture of Father Anderson with Sister Yumie, Wolfe, and Archbishop Maxwell, taken when the latter three were still children. Jenna had first looked at Wolfe with keen interest, only to be a bit disappointed when she couldn't tell much more about them as a child than she could now. The only real difference was the lack of bandages.
Then she had looked at Father Anderson's rugged, unshaven face; his short, rumpled blond hair; his broad shoulders and huge hands resting on Maxwell's shoulders. The sharp scar running from just beneath his left eye, all the way down to his chin—not much more alarming than the cross-shaped scar Father Callahan bore on his own forehead.
After that, Jenna had looked at Father Anderson's smile and wished she could have known him. Like the children who had, she would have loved him, she was certain.
(continued)